There has been conventionally known an exemplary vehicle air conditioner including an air conditioning unit with a cooling heat exchanger and a heating heat exchanger and an air blowing unit for blowing air into the air conditioning unit, for example, as disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 9-123748. The air conditioning and air blowing units are disposed inside of an instrument panel so as to be located substantially in the widthwise middle of a car and toward the front-passenger's seat, respectively.
The air conditioning unit is provided at its bottom end side with an air inlet leading from the air blowing unit. An air introduced into the air conditioning unit through the inlet passes through the cooling and heating heat exchangers, which are located above the inlet and substantially horizontally arranged one above the other, and is guided into the passenger's room through a duct extending from above the heat exchangers. With this air conditioning unit, juxtaposition of two heat exchangers one above the other allows the air conditioning unit to be downsized and thereby to be reduced in its installation space.
In the above prior art air conditioner disclosed, cooler pipes for an evaporator as a cooling heat exchanger and heater pipes for a heater core as a heating heat exchanger are arranged at the side wall of the air conditioning unit toward the air blowing unit or at the opposite side wall thereof. A drain port is provided at a suitable position of a bottom wall part of the air conditioning unit to drain off water downward.
Also, in the prior art air conditioner, the cooler pipes and heater pipes are attached to a dash panel disposed at the front of the air conditioning unit, but there is no clear description about specific positions at which the pipes are actually attached to the dash panel.
Furthermore, in the above prior art, the bottom end of the vertically elongated air conditioning unit is located in the vicinity of the floor of the vehicle body, whereas the air blowing unit has to be disposed sufficiently away from the floor in order to obtain legroom at the front of the front-passenger's seat. This invites a large level difference between the outlet of the air blowing unit and the inlet of the air-conditioning unit. In this case, in order to smoothly send the air from the blowing unit to the air conditioning unit, it is necessary to space both the units away from each other by a predetermined distance or more in the car widthwise direction.